“Satire” in the Reign of Charles II

Abstract

c 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2005/10203-0002$10.00 How did readers and theatergoers in the period circa 1660–85 understand “satire” as a genre, mode, concept, or whatever they took it to be? I pose the question because I am convinced that we tend to bring severely distortive knowledge and assumptions to the poems, prose pieces, and plays that constitute Carolean satire. Almost inevitably we think of classical antecedents (Horace, Juvenal) and of a tradition that extends from the time of William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer through John Donne and beyond. Naturally we also tend to think in terms of John Dryden’s foundational history and definition in his 1693 “Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire.” We may or may not refrain from invoking the concept of “Augustan satire” as it has come down to us from Ian Jack, Maynard Mack, Robert C. Elliott, Alvin B. Kernan, Ronald Paulson, and others—excellent and important scholarship, all of it, but heavily influenced by concern with Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. I am focusing on the quartercentury arbitrarily delimited by the reign of Charles II because broad reading has convinced me that the actual practice of satire changed quite a lot in mid-century and again after the revolution of 1688. There are few studies concentrating on the period at issue. Rose Zimbardo’s 1998 book on satire in “Restoration England,” for example, covers not only the 1690s but A Tale of a Tub. I am going to argue that our easy lumping together of Carolean and later writing is bad methodology—and is seriously misleading in its results. Carolean satire should not be classified as a part of the so-called Augustan satire. I am also going to argue that although “satire” unquestionably exists in at least a small number of Carolean plays, the problems of dealing with satiric verse and prose are significantly different from those we encounter in satiric drama of the time. This essay presents, in short, an attempt at historicist reconstruction of contemporary readers’ understanding of “Satire” in the Reign of Charles II